Reviews for Planning for action

The average rating for Planning for action based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-12-11 00:00:00 Alex Keller I very much feel the burden of overstudy, being sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, so I borrowed this book thinking it might provide me useful tips for untangling my thoughts and streamlining my sentences. Published in 1969, it appeared to have that mid-century American gusto that dispenses practical tips with optimism and frankness. Turns out it's pretty much an extended rant by a bitter, pervy old professor who's fed up with having to teach first-years the fundamentals of argumentative essays. His satirizing of their blunders has little humor in it, his corrections of their fallacies is dripping with charmless contempt. You can practically see the blood coming out of his eyes as he rages over how none of these naive midwesterners will give Communism a fair shake. He relaxes though when he gets to diagnose the true problem with their thinking, that they won't acknowledge their "unconscious needs and fears." In a passage that jars the reader away from the logical analysis he explicitly set out to be an example of, we get this: "Let us then, take a brief look at some of the truths about yourself that you would discover if you were to spend a couple of years on an analysts couch probing this hidden realm: "You have homosexual desires. You hate your parents. You have incestuous desires toward your sister or sisters (if you are male), toward your brother or brothers (if you are female). You desire to be loved and to be made love to by your father (if you are a woman), by your mother (if you are a man). You have sadistic impulses that cause you to take pleasure in inflicting pain on others. You feel secretly ashamed of masturbating. You feel secretly inferior to others." Several paragraphs later, he gives us the definition of psychological projection: "ascribing to others feelings, impulses, or characteristics, which you yourself possess but which you have repressed or deny that you possess." Ascribing to others! Curious, that. I don't know enough about Freud to call myself a Freudian but maybe he was really onto something with that idea.....I think men and women like Kytle suffer most painfully and ironically from this condition. This book is mostly only good for amusement from seeing unintentional revelations such as this, and seeing another champion of "complexity" and "logical analysis" fall over and over again into contradictions and direct refutations of his own points, especially when he starts to deal with his old enemy "abstractions" which he insists, don't exist and/or have no meaning (while he uses them continually). With abstractions, "you must always CONCRETIZE," he says. And this book has, appropriately, all the soullessness and dirt of concrete.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-08-19 00:00:00 Paul Takehiro Moved to gwern.net.